The best plays generally involve some form of transformation with at least the main character and, ideally, with all the characters — not in some artificial, let’s-shoehorn-an-interesting-twist-in-an-otherwise-uninteresting-script way, but in a manner that feels natural, life-like.

“Game Over,” a work by a young New York playwright named Josh Levine, does just that. And the young Vermont company Red Stage Theatre, which prides itself in presenting plays that are off the beaten path yet have a lot to say about the human condition, is doing stellar work with Levine’s script in its second season at the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center.

Ostensibly a play about two soldiers struggling to cope with life back home, “Game Over” is really about people trying to make human connections, keep human connections and forget human connections. That each of the trio of characters in “Game Over” at some point taps into all of those categories shows that Levine is a writer in command of his craft. That the three performers deliver those complex roles with a deft dramatic touch shows that Red Stage Theatre is not just tilting at windmills by taking on challenging plays, it’s hitting the mark.

“Game Over” — which Red Stage is performing in repertory along with “Spring Awakening” — begins with one of the returning soldiers, Jimmy (played by Nick Abeel), confidently addressing a group of school kids about his time in the military (the eye patch he wears, we later learn, may not be the only thing covering his wounds of war). Meanwhile, his boyhood and wartime chum, Marcus (Krys Mateo), sits in the apartment he shares with his chipper girlfriend, Carla (Aaron Ballard), sullenly playing violent video games all day while sitting on a crummy futon surrounded by crushed Red Bull cans. Jimmy came home with swagger; Marcus came home with a trauma he can’t confront.

Carla, frustrated at the dark psychological hole Marcus has fallen into, tries to pull him out of it by talking with him and by asking the seemingly well-adjusted Jimmy to help him as well. It’s a case of “be careful what you wish for:” She gets what she wants, and Marcus turns a corner; yet by learning what has affected Marcus, and what he and Jimmy went through together in the war zone, Carla suffers her own trauma. And by revisiting their shared experience, Marcus finds relief in the revealing while Jimmy encounters something he hoped was buried in the past.

Mateo, who performed in Red Stage’s first year last summer in the quirky play “Five Flights,” is a powerhouse in the role of Marcus. He makes the audience care about his character even when he’s difficult and churlish, and when he comes out of his shell he becomes funny and charming without any of it feeling forced. Ballard, the star of 2009’s “Five Flights,” meets Mateo dramatic punch for dramatic punch, giving Carla a naive vulnerability that turns into a deeply wounded soul. Abeel, a newcomer to Red Stage this year, cunningly shows what happens when a regular guy is forced to deal with circumstances that are anything but regular. Credit goes to Maryna Harrison, the play’s director and the co-artistic director of Red Stage Theatre, for keeping the play’s focus laser-sharp.

Much of what makes “Game Over” work so well can be found in the little things: Mateo’s shallow, telling breaths as Marcus begins to confront his pain, or the sounds of war from the video game Marcus plays that could just as easily be the sounds rattling around his tortured head. It’s a short play (a taut 75 minutes) that uses little things to say a lot about big issues.